New COVID vaccine is developed by University of Washington. What makes it different?
The University of Washington developed a vaccine for COVID-19 and plans to ship millions of doses to South Korea once it’s authorized, UW Medicine announced in an April 25 news release.
The vaccine, GPB510, was found to be “safe and effective during a multinational trial of more than 4,000 adults,” the news release said.
The scientists who developed the vaccine were hoping to create a “second-generation” version that could help aid vaccination efforts across the globe, according to the release. Unlike other COVID-19 vaccines, including Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, doses of GPB510 remain “stable without deep freezing,” the university said.
GPB510 is also “effective at low doses” and “simple to manufacture at scale,” according to the university.
“These attributes would enable vaccination at a global scale by reaching people in areas where medical, transportation, and storage resources are limited,” the university said in the release.
The GPB510 vaccine also differs from previous ones that use mRNA, or messenger RNA, which teaches the body’s cells how to make copies of the spike proteins found on the coronavirus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Instead, GPB510 is made with “proteins that form tiny particles studded with fragments of the pandemic coronavirus,” the university said in the news release.
“In order to focus the antibody response where it matters most, we decided to include in the vaccine only a key fragment of the coronavirus spike protein, known as the receptor-binding domain,” David Veesler, an associate professor of biochemistry and HHMI investigator at UW Medicine, said in the release. “We are thrilled to see that this strategy paid off and has led to a successful subunit vaccine.”
The South Korean government has agreed to buy 10 million doses of the new vaccine, the release said. If the vaccine receives full approval from regulators, it will also be distributed through COVAX, a global initiative that seeks to distribute COVID-19 vaccines around the world.
“We know we have more than 2 billion people worldwide that have not received a single dose of vaccine,” Veesler said in the release. “If our vaccine is distributed through COVAX, it will allow it to reach these people that need to have access to doses.”
Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, there have been at least 510 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 globally and just over 11 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered worldwide, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.
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